Galsan
Tschinag, who expresses himself in a number of German and Mongolian literary
forms, considers himself to be first and foremost a shaman and secondly a poet;
by birthright he is chief of the Tuvan minority tribe in Mongolia. The Tuvans, consisting of some four thousand
native speakers of an oral Turkic language, are an endangered people.Some two thousand of them live as nomadic
hunters and shepherds in the High Altai reaches of West Mongolia – near the intersecting borders of Kazakhstan, Siberia, Mongolia and China – while the remaining two thousand Tuvans live in
cultural islands scattered across Central Mongolia.[1]
This people is mainly known in the West for their “throat-singing,” a type of
laryngeal drone with simultaneous overtone that hauntingly evokes the wide
steppes and background peaks of the Altai Range.

“Galsan
Tschinag” is a Mongolian pseudonymthe
boy was required to adopt in order to attend Mongolian schools; his native
Tuvan name is “Irgit Shynykbioglu Jurukuvá.”“Irgit” is a tribal designation, “Shynyk-“ a root form shared by his
extended family, and his given name “Jurukuvá” means in the Tuvan tongue “baby
of the fur-skin.”Before his own birth,
his mother had given birth to twin boys that lived only ten days; seven days
following that, according to Jurukuvá (Tschinag), the souls of the departed
twins communicated with their parents.They announced that they would return, but this time combined in one
body – with enough joys and the pains for two.Out of caution, the parents decided to keep the next child hidden: when
Jurukuvá was born in late winter, 1944, he was negated or kept under wraps, so
to speak, until he could walk.When the
parents needed to refer to him, they spoke of the “contents of the fur-skin,”
which in the expanded Tuvan idiomatic sense meant something kept totally secret
– especially from spirits.

Within five years Jurukuvá was showing promise as a
shaman through his songs and sayings, a fact recognized by his aunt, herself a
shaman, who began to train him how to turn to the spirits for verse.Within the birth order of the family,
Jurukuvá was selected to be the one to look after the tribe, a duty he
maintains to this day.

Speaking
the Tuvan language aloud was forbidden in Mongolian schools; as the child of a
culture without a written language, Jurukuvá was required to write in the
Mongolian language and script and to take on a Mongolian name, which morphed
into Galsan Tschinag.His teachers
apparently recognized in him a student capable of both critical thought and of
abundant creativity, so he was nurtured and encouraged under the socialist
system of schooling.Besides Mongolian
and his native Tuvan, he learned to speak Kazakh and Russian well and had
become a recognized poet among Tuvans and Kazakhs by the end of his secondary
education.[2]

Following one year of Mongolian language and
literature studies at the university in Ulan Bator, Tschinag experienced the
great fortune of being selected in 1962 to travel to the far-off
sister-socialist country of the German Democratic Republic (GDR: East Germany)
to attend classes at the University of Leipzig.This seemed at times a grand misfortune to the Central Asian nomad – due
to massive culture shock and homesickness, despite his having carried with him
a stone from the highest mountain of the Altai range.Before his arrival – and in consequence of
tales about World War II – his first expectation of Germany had been to find a country full of fascists and
warmongers.After some time in his host
country, though, he was able to withhold judgment until he had made long and
thorough observations:he came to love
this people that was so different from himself.[3]

In Leipzig Tschinag spent one year at the Herder
Institute to learn German and then launched into the study of German language
and literature at the university, sometimes almost literally in the footsteps
of Goethe. A series of fortuitous friendships guided him in ways that were to
enhance his career as a writer.The
first of these friendships was with Erika Taube, a renowned specialist in
Mongolian studies able to acquaint him with facts and findings about his own
people – from the standpoint of Western scholarship – that complemented his own
observations.Building on that base, he
hasin recent years become a unique
ethno-poet capable of seeing his own cultural roots from both the inside and
the outside.

Erwin Strittmatter, the East German author, also
befriended Tschinag and became his mentor at the end of the young Tuvan’s study
years (and after he had completed a thesis on “Tragic Elements in the Works of
Erwin Strittmatter”).Besides their
literary leanings, Strittmatter and Tschinag also shared a love of the equestrian
arts.At Strittmatter’s horse ranch, Schulzenhof,Tschinag taught his older friend the basics
of bareback riding and lasso throwing as practiced by Tuvan horse
shepherds.In return, the accomplished
author showed the fledgling writer how to enhance and “liberate” written
passages through the use of circumlocution, strategic omissions, and a
tightening of narrative material.[4]

Despite
harsh images transmitted to us from the Cold War, East Germany actually represented – due to its historical setting
– a relatively liberal form of Communist rule.This was particularly true when compared to Mongolia, which attempted to compensate for its meager
population, in Tschinag’s opinion, by outperforming all other socialist
countries in ideological zeal.Particularly
galling was the Mongolian policy toward ethnic minorities:in the 1960s the Tuvans were forcibly removed
from their ancestral grounds in the Altai region and forced to resettle to Central Mongolia, to “put down roots,” a totally incomprehensible
and alien act for nomads.All forms of
literature about ethnic minorities or tribal customs were likewise forbidden
and repressed.

Returning from his Leipzig years to Ulan Bator in 1968, Galsan Tschinag became a Lecturer in
German at the Mongolian state university, but the next eight years were a time
in which he was alternately persecuted as an “unreliable element” for his
spoken and written opinions, denounced, stripped of his position, and then
gradually woven back into socialist society again. Today he shuns the titles of
resistance fighter or anti-Communist for at least two reasons:(1)Communism is dead, and his culture refuses to speak ill of the dead; and
(2) he is firmly convinced that without the hard-knock schooling of socialism
he would not have developed so well as a person or as a poet.For him, socialism was a harsh but necessary
father who took the poet’s potentially weak flesh and made of it a tanned hide.[5]

Tschinag’s first impulse to publish his writings in
German-speaking countries was seconded by his status as an outcast in Mongolia – with the consequent impossibility of publishing
there. Even so, his first prose work, Eine
tuwinische Geschichte (A Tuvan Tale)
was only permitted to appear in the GDR through the personal intervention of
Strittmatter with the head of state, Erich Honecker.Upon the fall of Communism, of course, the
publication of his works came to rely more on their somewhat romanticized
content and form, not on any political considerations.He has since published over a dozen prose
works, some of which put Tuvan oral histories to paper for the first time,
others of which are highly autobiographical.In the latter camp is Die Karawane(The
Caravan), in which prose narratives combine with diary notes to recapture the
grand Tuvan event of 1995: Tschinag, at the head of a giant caravan powered
more by Toyota pickup trucks than by horses or camels, moved many of his
nomadic people 2,000 kilometers, restoring them to ancestral grazing lands in
the Altai Mountains, an area from which they had been forcibly resettled in
Stalinist years.

It
is clear from Tschinag’s writing, both in prose and in verse, that he is
disturbed by the cultural divide between East and West, perhaps in a way only
possible for someone who knows both so intimately.He sees his own people as threatened and
primitive, while he see Europe as a society of consumers that are inwardly
hollowed out, with neither souls nor a sense of family. He takes one of his
goals to be a writer who bridges that gap, someone who can represent his people
and their ways to the West in a literary voice that reaches between the
antipodes of Asia and Europe.[6]In his mind, the East can offer two valuable
things:an ancient, gray philosophy of
life (an interior landscape that is key to psychological balance) and a culture
of interpersonal relations and interdependence, the sort of reliance on
community that is vital for a nomadic society living under harsh conditions.[7]

A
further distinction that Tschinag makes is between the “round” culture of
nomads and the “angular” culture of city dwellers – even in Asian cities.The stars, the planets, the earth, the womb,
blood corpuscles, and most natural phenomena are round, while even life itself
is cyclical.The city, on the other
hand, goes against a natural order with lines and angles, with its angular
streets, angular fields, and angular houses with people trying to live pointed
lives.Nomads, he says, live in a
rounded manner, patiently, slowly, without violence.[8]

As a Tuvan author who writes in the German
language, rather than as a “German” author, Tschinag has developed a form that
goes far beyond the use of a poetic pidgin; his is a unique poetic lingua franca that combines elemental
vividness with psychological insight.No
German poet would have the background to conceive of “soul-white snow” and
“cloud-trapping rocks” below the “blued-in sky,” phrases used by the shaman
Tschinag, phrases that seem as surreal as the landscape of the High Altai
range.By offering fresh Asian imagery,
the none-too-modest Tschinagproposes to
infuse new life into the overly sophisticated affectations of verse in the
poetry-poor land of Germany.He has the world of the
nomads behind him, he claims, a world that has not yet left its roots – unlike
the Western world that is chasing after “progress.”For him, poetry is an image dressed in words;
the poet first has to see that image clearly and feelit deeply.[9]

Just as Central
Asia seems limitless to the
nomad, a stylistic lack of boundaries in Tschinag’s poetry enables and
reinforces the imagery of unbounded migratory movement.The reader of his poetry sees no periods or
other punctuation to indicate stoppage: sentence boundaries are intimated by
line placement or by syntax – rather than by direct denotation.The punctuation tools that Tschinag does use
are an occasional comma or dash, both of which allow the flow to continue.Within
this boundlessness, Tschinag crafts word-images describing the consequences of
natural phenomena – turbulence from flapping wings of geese that flew over
hours before, or warmth from the smoke of a distant fire – in order to imbue
them with poetic permanence.They
become part of a shamanic spell.

Tschinag has said: “one
has to address the cult objects with a refined, clear and powerful poetic
language in order to be heard.”His
people believes language to be such a strong and influential force
that poetry may only be written after the time of thunderstorms is past.You can learn more about his poetic and
shamanic tradition from a talk presented
in Rotterdam as the 1999 “Defence of Poetry” address,
entitled “Defense of the Stone Against Plaster,” which is available in English
translation.

From
the beginning, says Tschinag, he knew that he would use a foreign language if
destiny were to choose him as the first writing poet of his people.That language is German.His poetry has earned him acclaim in the
German-speaking world, including the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1992 and
the Heimito von Doderer Literary Prize in 2001.

The poems translated on this website
come from the following collections, each of which was published by Waldgut
Verlag in Frauenfeld, Switzerland:

It has been a joy for me to search
for strong and vivid equivalents to Galsan Tschinag’s poetic phrases.It is my hope that his role as an ambassador
for an endangered culture will go forward successfully and that his mediation
between East and West may find ready acceptance within the English-speaking
world.

– Richard Hacken

[1]Traces of the tribe can also be found in
neighboring Siberia and in China’s
Xinjiang province.The total for those
of related Tuvan blood may actually number into the hundreds of thousands, but
the vast majority of these, according to Tschinag, have been “Mongolized” into
a loss of their native language and culture.

[6] On at
least one occasion (“Rund und eckig,” p. 98), Tschinag referred to himself as a
“Gegenmissionar,” a counter-missionary to the “white brothers” –
Christian missionaries – who have been attentively imposing themselves on
Mongolians since the fall of Communism.